And one of my favourites that I failed to mention....Contact:
And my favourite quote from that movie''........
Ellie Arroway to a small group of children...................

"I'll tell you one thing about the universe, though. The universe is a pretty big place. It's bigger than anything anyone has ever dreamed of before. So if it's just us... seems like an awful waste of space. Right"?

Lucas et al merely recreated atmospheric combat in a supposedly weightless environment, yet failed to grasp/understand how things actually move in such an environment. It looks good, of that there is no doubt, and almost certainly reflects the perception that every 7 year old has of what it might be like.
But realistic? Ha ha. Nice one! Made me smile!

What works in Sci-Fi you find the most important for the development of the genre, including movies, books (both fiction and non-fiction), theories, etc.?

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War of the Worlds, of course.
Rossum's Universal Robots. Not many books out there that have actually created new words. And also the first serious look at artificial life.
The Machine Stops. Predicted the societal problems caused by the Internet. In 1909.
Brave New World.
A Martian Odyssey. First decent attempt at a description of life on Mars.
The Marching Morons. Good description of devolution caused by birth control.
Starship Troopers and Forever War. Both were the beginnings of thoughtful looks at future war. Also could add Ender's Game here.
Stranger in a Strange Land. What it's like to be an alien - told by an alien.
Ringworld. Started the SF genre of macroengineering. Perhaps also the Titan series by Brin.
Neuromancer. Started cyberpunk.
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. One of the first hard-SF stories that included a societal component.
1984, of course.

Yeah, that's not the right word. I didn't mean they move or act realistically. Just that the ships seemed so real you could touch them. Like nothing we'd seen before.
I guess simply unprecedented special effects is what I mean.

I don't have a clue what is or isn't important. I just know what I liked.

My favorite science fiction novel of all time is Arthur Clarke's The City and the Stars. It's just beautifully written from a literary point of view. (Which isn't surprising since Clarke actually wrote it twice. The earlier version was called 'Against the Fall of Night'. It's very good too and to Clarke's surprise, both versions remained in print.) It has that sense of wonder and transcendence that originally attracted me to science fiction. It has staggering scale, both in terms of time (a unimaginably-future Earth billions of years from now that has lost its oceans and become like today's Mars) and space (the entire galaxy, and beyond space and time entirely). It has lots of contemporary touches, which are extraordinary given that the book was written back in 1956. It has artificial intelligences and immortal human selves stored for eternity in computer memories.

And it has the same historical pathos that you (and I) expressed in the 'giving up space exploration' thread. It's about precisely the choice that thread discusses. The whole story is about a far future remnant of immortal (sort of) humanity living endlessly reincarnated lives in an eternal city run by AIs, a society that's turned its back on the rest of the universe and turned instead to the pursuit of pleasure. But while the secret of their origins has been edited out of their memories, the spectre of what they've lost hangs over them in the sky, where the constellations themselves are artificial, artifacts of stars moved around by long gone space-faring civilization. So they never look at the sky and are hardly able to even think about it without inexplicable terror. So their whole society is built around ignoring anything the lies beyond their city's opaque dome.

Human curiosity has been lost for good. Except that the AIs turn out to be more humane and far wiser than these last-humans, since while the "humans" have forgotten, the AIs haven't. Because they can't tell, they create a brand new human self in their depths that hasn't already lived a million pointless empty lives, incarnate him in a physical body in the same way the recorded selves are endlessly reembodied, and then feed his curiosity, guiding him on a voyage of discovery, helping him recover for himself a tiny fragment of the lost history of the human race and what the unimaginable destiny of the rest of humanity was.

Arthur Clarke was newly emigrated to Sri Lanka in 1956 at the time this novel was written, and it's tempting to read it as his take on Buddhism, with the eternal city in which human selves are endlessly reincarnated as samsara, the world of endless suffering, and the destiny that the rest of humanity chose and the city's residents rejected as nirvana.